Free Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule

visit an hour before, he might very
    well still be inside.   The men surrounding the house fully believed
    they had a hostage situation.
     
    They waited, officers poised at each of three exterior doors of the
    house and at all the windows.   Five minutes.   Ten minutes.
     
    No one bolted from the house, vomiting and blinded by the gas.
     
    After fifteen minutes, Lieutenant Thornhill, Detective Lambert, and
    Sergeant Vance donned oxygen masks provided by the East Point Fire
    Department and edged into the basement.
     
    It was so hard to see; tears ran down their faces despite their masks
    and the fans the fire fighters had set up to air out the cellar.   They
    stumbled over lumber and tools, a half-finished boat, a surfboard, a
    miniature railroad track mounted on a sheet of plywood.   It was like
    anyone's cellar, a repository for things to be used later, or things
    once used and no longer needed.
     
    They could make out the white-clad body sitting on the basement steps,
    and, just opposite, behind the heating system, there was the brick base
    of a fireplace.   It had a large rectangular hole in it-three feet high
    by about a foot and a half wide-easily large enough for a man to hide
    in.   They had no idea how far back it went.
     
    Outside the hole they found a bloodstained flashlight, turned off, and
    a .32-caliber pistol wedged between a surfboard and the plywood that
    held the electric train.   Their own flashlights picked up a profusion
    of still-liquid puddles and droplets of blood on the floor around the
    hole in the base of the fireplace.
     
    Back toward the stairs they located a .45/70 rifle and a crowbar near a
    stack of interior doors.   Their tear-gassed eyes burned and blurred,
    but behind the doors they discerned what looked like a leg clad in blue
    pants.
     
    They moved closer with their guns drawn.
     
    Ca tain L nn ordered the uniformed division to fan out on foot to check
    the neighborhood for a suspect.   At that point, they knew only that an
    older woman was dead.   The young woman on the scene was too hysterical
    to be of much help, although they knew now that she was Carolyn
    Allanson, the ex-daughter-inlaw of Walter Allanson.   She repeated over
    and over that someone had been in the basement and Daddy Allanson had
    gone down to "get him."   She continued to babble about "Daddy" and
    "Mother."
     
    Daddy had had someone "caught in the hole" and she had begged Mother
    Allanson not to go down in the cellar.   Almost as an aside, the
    distraught woman said that she had seen "Tom's new wife" driving around
    the block in her blue jeep.   Beyond that, she was no help at all.
     
    When they tried to probe deeper, she lost control again.
     
    They couldn't count on much of anything the woman said in her current
    state.
     
    It was no secret to the East Point police that Walter Allanson and his
    son, Tom, had been feuding.   They had heard rumors about an ambush up
    at Lake Lanier and Tom and Pat had been in to the police station only a
    few days before, trying to charge his father with indecent exposure.
     
    If Pat Allanson was in the neighborhood, the East Point police wanted
    to find her as quickly as possible.   They had so little to go on as
    Captain Lynn, Sergeant R. W. Jones, and Sergeant Callahan drove their
    police cruisers in ever-widening circles around Norman Berry Drive,
    looking for anything that seemed unusual, for someone running, and for
    either Tom Allanson's blue pickup truck or the blue jeep Pat had been
    seen driving. from the Allanson house.
     
    The King Professional Building occupied the triangle of land just
    between Bayard Street and the point where Norman Berry drive intersects
    eve avenue.   It was new
    construction, a manystoried concrete structure whose white fretwork
    panels made it resemble an out-of-place mosque.   The wide cement
    parking apron was almost empty of cars at 8:20 on a rainy night, but
    the East Point officers spotted the blue jeep they